Harmony Korine

The cult director and his longtime music supervisor Randall Poster talk about the ecstatic, bass-bombing soundtrack of their new film, Spring Breakers.

Pitchfork: What are the logistics of putting you, Harmony, Skrillex, and Cliff Martinez together? Seems like a lot of cooks in the kitchen.

Randall Poster: My work with Harmony begins even before there’s a full script. We traced out some points of interest and then narrowed in. Harmony is very strong with music in terms of being aware of what’s bubbling up. We wanted there to be a hip-hop element by virtue of [James Franco's] Alien character, but he also wanted to bring urban reality into it, and then he had this notion of having the sound of Skrillex in the film.

If you find the music to be poetic at all, that poetry is in Skrillex’s unique and incredibly romantic sound. The remarkable thing about Skrillex is he’s not afraid of emotion. He’s like Harmony-- they don’t necessarily avoid the pop element. And because there’s so much film music in the movie, it made sense to have an experienced hand like Cliff Martinez as part of the creative team in terms of creating a complete musical tableau.

Pitchfork: As a result, there are hardly any moments in the film that have no music whatsoever. Did you ever consider pulling it back?

RP: We did pull back a little bit, but not much. In the film, you’re going back and forth in time, and a visual pattern emerges. The music gives you a footing in the editorial style.

Pitchfork: The girls break out in song a few times. Was any of that improvised?

RP: Yes. One day they just started singing Nelly’s “Hot in Herre”. During filming, I was sitting in command central monitoring when the girls were improvising songs, so I could make sure we could get the rights to it.

Pitchfork: There are a lot of songs that are in the movie that sound like they would be expensive to include-- like “Hot in Herre” or Britney Spears’ “Everytime”. I often think about the episode of “Mad Men” that used the Beatles for a quarter of a million dollars.

RP: I have to deal with the rights and the coordination of all that. Either the artists are going to embrace it by appreciating Harmony’s body of work and his point of view, or it isn’t going to work out. But the artists we reached out to were very supportive of the whole project. For instance, the Britney Spears camp was very supportive of the film, and the licensing of her music was not unreasonable.

Pitchfork: Did either of you go back to old footage of MTV’s "Spring Break" from the early 2000s for inspiration?

RP: Harmony has been collecting a lot of imagery from spring breaks for years and years, so he used some of those more mainstream, accessible images, too. He said he wanted it to feel like he was shooting the movie through Skittles. He was trying to capture that color scheme, that innocent reference point, but then he spins it.

Harmony doesn’t condescend when it comes to big teen-pop idols-- he really appreciates pop music and the power of those songs and those performers. It relates to the value of casting these girls who are teen idols today and pushing them into a more adult scenario. He doesn’t condescend to his audience. And he’s obsessed with teen obsession. Harmony is a really big fan of Britney Spears, he appreciates the potency. And he has a keen empathy for underdogs and outsiders. He certainly knows how to create sensation, but it’s always musically rewarding and exposes people to things they probably don’t know as well as they should.